Police Perspective to Be Presented at Trial on Stop-and-Frisk Tactic

By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN

March 26, 2013

One officer described how car thieves might pretend to be beggars, sifting through curbside trash. “If someone is in the middle of a dark street, staring into the car and then when we drive by, they start ripping up garbage bags,” the police officer, Michael Noboa, said, “that would give me reasonable suspicion to conduct a stop, question” and possibly frisk.

Another officer in the same Brooklyn precinct, Kha Dang, explained how gang members often stash a gun nearby when they congregate outdoors. So he might grow suspicious, he explained, if he observed people repeatedly glancing over at a trash can or “at the bushes, you know, no person would sit there and keep looking at the bushes like that.”

In the debate over the Police Department’s use of stop-and-frisk tactics, the discussion has largely pitted the accounts of those who have been stopped — mostly young black and Latino men — against a staunch defense of the strategy by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg; the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly; and others who say it is a crucial crime-fighting tool that has saved lives. But largely absent has been the perspective of officers who spend their days on the streets carrying out the tactic, which has stoked intense resentment in many parts of the city and is now at the center of a federal trial in Manhattan.

Now, as a result of the unusually large number of stops they conducted, Officers Noboa and Dang, as well as a third officer in the same Brooklyn precinct, Edgar Gonzalez, are poised to become intriguing players in the trial over whether the city’s street stops have resulted in constitutional violations.

The officers have already described in pretrial testimony the kinds of suspicious behaviors that might lead to a street stop. At one point, the three officers were conducting an average of about 10 street stops a week, far more than other officers. Over one three-month period in 2009, according to legal papers, they were “three of the four N.Y.P.D. officers who recorded the highest number of stop, question and frisk encounters.”

Pretrial depositions from at least one of the officers are likely to be submitted into evidence in the next week or so. Officer Dang is also expected to be called as a witness, lawyers say.

Hundreds of pages of testimony from the officers, obtained by The New York Times, offer a window into the unvarnished street-level experiences of the officers who were unusually active when it came to finding and confronting behavior they deemed suspicious. It also goes to the central issue of the trial: whether officers only stop individuals who they have reason to believe are engaged in criminal activity, or whether the stops are a result of racial profiling.

In their statements, the officers described various legal standards related to encounters between the police and the public. While officers have a right to approach anyone to request information, the encounter only becomes a stop, as Officer Noboa explained, once “you temporarily detain somebody while you’re speaking to them.”

Officer Gonzalez, in his deposition, explained that, “We can’t just stop anyone for the sake of stopping a person.”

Indeed, before conducting a stop, Officer Gonzalez said an officer had to believe “the person has committed a crime, is committing a crime or is about to commit a crime.”

Three officers in the 88th Precinct in Brooklyn had the most stop-and-frisk episodes in a three-month period in 2009.

Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

The officers offered examples of situations in which suspicious behavior might result in a stop.

Officer Gonzalez said he might grow suspicious if someone were waiting at a bus stop and “every possible bus that they could possibly get on has come through and went, and this person is still there.”

Officer Dang said that men “randomly looking in apartment windows” had led to a number of stops.

Still, Officer Noboa said he tried not to jump to conclusions when observing seemingly suspicious behavior, often pausing before moving in to stop someone. “I don’t want to stop someone without having the reasonable suspicion, and I usually just wait and make the observation,” Officer Noboa said. “Maybe I’m overlooking something, maybe I’m not seeing the bigger picture.”

The officers also explained that not every stop was the result of an out-of-the-blue observation. Some stops occurred in response to a specific crime, often as an officer drove a victim in search of a suspect. “When you have a victim of a crime in a car, and she tells you this is the person that did it, and you would obviously stop them, you know,” Officer Gonzalez explained.

The officers’ testimony also contained reminders that even in a large city, crime can be local. The three officers, assigned to the Clinton Hill and Fort Greene neighborhoods, grew familiar with the criminals in their precincts. According to the testimony, they often compared notes about the demeanor of a particular suspect during interactions with various officers.

Officer Dang explained that he might know a person he was stopping given “my previous experience from arresting the person, or the person has been wanted by the detective squad for a particular crime.”

The three officers all joined the Police Department in 2005. Two of the officers are Hispanic and the other is Asian. All three worked in plainclothes, part of the 88th Precinct’s anticrime teams, a destination for young, hardworking officers eager to prove they have the makings of a detective.

Anticrime officers perform far more stops than uniformed patrol officers, who primarily respond to 911 calls. It is common for an anticrime officer to perform about 20 street stops a month. But the three officers each recorded between 126 and 134 stops over a three-month period. Some of the stops came amid an escalating gang war in July 2009 at the Ingersoll and Whitman public housing developments.

A number of the deposition questions focused on the fact that blacks represented about 90 percent of the people the officers stopped.

“A lot of the times people are calling 911 and giving us a description and whoever they described is essentially who we end up stopping,” Officer Dang explained, adding that a suspect’s descriptions went well beyond race.

“If all you knew was the person’s race, and nothing else, then no, you couldn’t stop anybody,” he said.

The testimony offers few clues into the tenor of the actual street interactions. When a lawyer for the plaintiffs asked why so few of his stops seemed to result in an arrest, Officer Dang replied, “Hopefully the reason I’m not arresting them is because I’m preventing them from doing certain crimes.”